Antinicanor

                             "Qué es un antipoeta...

                                     un pequeño burgués?

                                     un charlatán?

                                     un dios?

                                     un inocente?
                                     un aldeano de Santiago de Chile?"*

                                                                 Nicanor Parra

I do not say that Nicanor Parra is not my mistress

or that when he walks, alive or dead, he treads not on earth

but in an otherwise empty set of air.

I do not say he is not a venomed dyssocratic serpent of wily irony,

like Kierkegaard, slithering on null feet and zero reason.

I do not say that he is not a poet nor antipoet, nor bard nor antibard,

nor self-styled porcupine from inner space.

I do not say that he is not an ersatz and belated Marcel Duchamp--

blind, retarded, and at least a hundred years behind the times.

I do not say that he is not an imbecile or that he had nothing more to say

after poetry or antipoetry or unpoetry left him uninspired in 1962.

I do not say that his Ars Poetique is not a Reader's Digest abridgment

mocking Paul Verlaine, ignorant of Horace and envious of Vicente Huidobro.

I do not say his antiverses or unverses or contraverses do not equal

pettier ones of Jorge Luis Borges or that physics by rote does not match the other's fiction.

I do not say he is not an adolescent poet advising himself that

in poetry null and void and not at all anything goes.

I do not say that he never leaves a blank page better off from having soiled it

or that he was not unutterably persevering and reactionary in his beshitting.

I do not say he is innumerate and cannot multiply the word imaginary

times 25 in 27 lines to the unplayed melody of the Beatles' Nowhere Man.

I do not say that he is not too bright nor excessively stupid nor that he did not

get on well with Mrs. Nixon.

I do not say that he does not consider Augusto Pinochet, 

taking tea with Margaret Thatcher, the savior of his country.

I do not say that, strictly logically, an ironic double-dealing retraction

cannot not be, like papal infallibility, retracted or unretracted.

I do not say that he is not the Chile that has fallen and still can't get up.

Yet his lips are not lascivious coral nor does he reek of finest balsamic

vinegar, nor is he Ezra Pound.

After all, he was on the so-called winning side.

Is he not then merely a traducer of Shakespeare and his life's lazy antioutput,

fat and apophatic, no more than the down and dirty mimesis of Sonnet 130?

E. A. Costa

E. A. Costa October 1, 2016 Granada, Nicaragua

______________________________________________

N.B.: *"What is an antipoet? A petit bourgeois?A charlatan?

A god? A naïf? A villager of Santiago de Chile?"